If you look around, it’s highly likely there is a digital device nearby. Most of the time it’s a cellphone, tablet or laptop. We are suffering from information indigestion, yet we crave for more. Billions of digital content is flowing on a 24/7 basis on the web. In fact, there are some people who live more in cyberspace than in their real homes.

The World Wide Web, The Web or The Cloud is covering us like a gargantuan blanket nurturing us with a zillion quantity of information. Yep, the digital revolution has taken our societies by storm and the trend is most likely to continue until something else emerges and we plunge into another brand new era.

In a 1984 novel dubbed, “Neuromancer“, William Gibson used the term “cyberspace” and the word struck a cultural nerve. Even as we speak, we are immersed in this ethereal cyberspace, together with billions of other human beings in almost every corner of the globe.

Gibson himself coined the term “cyberspace” in his novelette “Burning Chrome”, published in 1982 by Omni magazine. However, it was only through its use in Neuromancer that the term cyberspace gained enough recognition to become the de facto term for the World Wide Web during the 1990s. The part of Neuromancer usually cited in this respect is:

“The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games. … Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts. … A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.”

2 thoughts on “The Digital Revolution”

Yup, we’ll be there in cyberspace – along with the NSA, the FBI, etc. ad nauseum. I suppose for the quickest overview of what’s happening, today’s morning Drudge Report is worth a skim. Upper left is especially illuminating.

“Digital” and “revolution” may be related in a slightly different way before this all is over.😉